by Shahid Mansuri, co-founder of Peerbits
Simulating business processes in the gaming scenario is an interesting way to keep yourself intrigued in the business. Better if you were once a gaming freak in your early days of life. No matter if you are an employee, CEO, or even a stakeholder, you need to get aware of the buzz around gamification. It simplifies your task to comprehend and analyze business process to undertake resourceful activities.
Gamification is a trending tool to grow skills, behavioral design patterns, and solve problems that facilitate innovation. Gamification is the process of deploying gaming techniques designs to the business framework. The aim is to engage efficiently and motivate the ones who works for the common goal of the organization.
The noticeable advantage of gamification is that it makes learning more exciting by incorporating visual gaming elements and keeping it more practical. The idea is to convert the business activities into games in an assertive manner.
Often, technology is integrated into the gamification process that leads to innovation in the process along with the personnel growth, employee performance management, and escalation of a learning curve.
According to numerous industrial experts, gamification brings a positive change in the way people evolve within the organization. It is because there is much more to gamification than just badges and points. If deployed strategically, it might turn out to be the most popular mechanism to alter business operations in all the departments.
According to Brian Burke, it is an entirely different model altogether, and it might be possible that a lot of stakeholders in Information Technology organizations are unaware of gamification.
Undoubtedly, effective implementation of gamification technique can lead to a significant increment in business revenue as well. The entire process involves employees, customers, and any other group of interest who interacts with the business on a frequent basis. Few examples of companies or organizations that have managed to apply gamification effectively are Nike and Khan Academy. Nike utilized the concept of gamification to enhance the engagement level of fitness maniacs to take their workout session to a higher standard. On the other hand, Khan Academy does it to improve the students’ learning experience.
Since gamification is one of the “new age” practices that companies have their eye on, the initial phase of this rise has been followed by various misconceptions regarding its implementation. One commonly heard myth about gamification is that it is only for the young learners or perhaps, it should look like a game.
But in reality, the organization is expected to pay attention to their gamification design as even a bit of error can prove hazardous. Here are few of the steps that you can follow to figure out the appropriate gaming application for your business:
1. It is important to define the target players to get them actively involved in the gamification process.
It can be anyone; specific departmental staff, certain distinctive employees, managers, or even customers.
In case of engaging employees in the process, the prior objective should be to maximize the return on investment (ROI). The ideal way is to determine the areas you intend to improve.
Designing Gamification process for customers requires you to retrospect the online engagement model as well the offline methods. In the case of B2B business, the ideal way is to come up with a robust symbiotic gamification model for business progression.
2. It is possible to apply gamification in multiple areas like health and wellness, sales performance, training, and retention.
In case of health and wellness, the organization must come to a customized solution. In the event of health and wellness gamification, you can opt for a successful platform like Keas.
For gamification of the sales process and gauging its performance, the decision regarding the integration with the CRM software must be taken. If work process permits then it is best to go ahead with the Fantasy Sales platform for else Play Vox is always the best bet.
The training and retention area requires management to determine whether a deficit of learning management system. If there is, then is Badgeville offers a suitable platform. While in another case where the Learning Management System is already implemented, Wheeldo can work wonders.
3. While targeting gamification method for customers to increase online engagement, you should determine whether it is for new clients or customer retention.
In either case, you have the option.
While aiming to attract new customers, you can opt for any intuitive platform, or else, Gigya serves the purpose for customer retention. However, if your target is not limited to the enhancement of online engagement, then you should determine whether you would like to get regular customers back into your retail stores.
In case you are looking for restaurant management solution by gamification of the restaurant process then you should go for Belly. In case you run a retail store, then you should go for Perkville.
Shahid Mansuri co-founded Peerbits, one of the leading mobile app development companies, in 2011. His visionary leadership and flamboyant management style has yield fruitful results for the company. He believes in sharing his strong knowledge base with leaned concentration on entrepreneurship and business. Connect with Shahid on Linkedin.